That He Will Reap
by grumkinsnark
Summary: Eliot's killed his fair share of people. It's high time they remind him of it.


_Prompt: He starts hearing things and slowly comes to realize it's the voices of the people he's killed._

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**That He Will Reap**

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He doesn't notice them at first. The thoughts that whirl around in his head every day for the last ten-odd years are so numerous that it takes almost all his energy to prevent them driving him mad. It's part of the reason he's so pissed off at everything all the time—kind of difficult to maintain a mild demeanor when your head is a tinderbox. He's learned meditation techniques on his travels, but they do little to help.

So no, he doesn't notice them. At least, not until they _make_ him notice them.

It manifests at the most inopportune time, during a fight with mooks that aren't of the usual inept ilk, when all of a sudden he hears a woman's shriek. It breaks his concentration enough for one of the guys to get a kick to his gut, Eliot's awareness a second too late to prepare his muscles for the hit, and it knocks the wind out of him. Fortunately for him, he's used to the sensation so ignores it and finishes them off, and doesn't hear the shriek repeat itself. He disregards Nate's command to meet back at the rendezvous point, instead opting to search the hallways for the woman in hopes that the scream hadn't, in fact, been in his head, but she's nowhere to be found.

Given that his ears are ringing from a punch to the head he'd taken, he stubbornly chalks the scream up to that. Injuries he can handle. Injuries are temporary. Mental breaks are another story, and he _won't stand for it_.

The next time it happens is a cacophony of men's whimpering at an equally inopportune time, while he's, ah, _involved_ with an energetic brunette. He nearly collapses upon the girl from the strength of the sounds, and though he catches himself, his blood runs cold and he makes up some excuse to get the woman to leave. She kisses him but he feels none of it and downs half a bottle of Jack.

The next time it happens, it's worse.

He's just about to settle down to dinner with the team, pleased with how well his improvised black cherry glaze complements the lamb chops, when they strike him, knife clattering to the table. It's not a scream, but a child's voice clear as a church bell. The boy starts to say something in Krio, but it's cut off. Or begins that way. The voice then gets louder, pleads, _Mister, why'd you shoot me? I didn't wanna be a soldier, I had to, mister, they threatened my ma. Mister, why'd you do it? Whywhywhywhywhy?_ and Eliot's hands are white-knuckled fists. He sees his team staring at him, terrified, and Sophie's asking him something but all he hears is the little boy. All he _sees_ is the little boy, plucked straight from his memory, all ebony skin and striking blue eyes.

And suddenly, as if a dam's broke, the voices come to him all at once, accusing and shouting and crying and clawing at his brain. A pressure builds inside of him, begging to explode, to take his body and soul where it belongs, when suddenly there's a cold weight on his wrist and the dissonance fades.

Parker looks at him with no expression in particular, just soft blue eyes and that part of her that only he can decode—_they're dangerous, the two of them; they've nothing to lose, and the skills to make themselves disappear_—and he lets her unfurl his fingers. The others respectfully pretend nothing happened, going back to their colloquy, except Parker. She grazes his knee with hers, a silent solidarity. He's fairly certain she hasn't killed anyone, but now he wonders if she has voices in her head, too. Voices of foster parents with fists or excited laughter of kids who got chosen before her or of her little brother's whimpers as he lay in that street. It's this last ponderation that has him give the slightest nudge back—a gruff thanks, or maybe just a spastic nerve, he's not sure.

They stop for a while, seemingly placated by their dinnertime barrage, but like a bruise that slowly makes itself visible, they resurface in increments. Except, unlike a bruise, he can't just pop some ibuprofen and throw on an icepack. (He's tried the ibuprofen thing, trust him. And pethidine. And oxycodone. And hydromorphone. That last helped a little, until it didn't and all he was left with were the voices and dyspnea.)

They assault him while he's awake, they assault him while he's asleep, they assault him whenever they please, each one someone he'd personally killed by more weapons than he can count. The adversaries he'd dispatched during his time as a grunt are the quietest, for they, too, were in an army and know the rules of engagement. But all the others…well. Ghosts don't rest, and they're determined to make sure he doesn't either.

He goes a full week running on a grand total of half an hour of shuteye, sheer willpower the only thing allowing him to function at all. Nate's the one who prevents Sophie and Hardison from fretting over him, which Eliot appreciates: he can't guarantee he wouldn't lose patience and say something to them he couldn't take back. They don't know just how tenuous a hold he has on his wrath, now more so than ever, and he doesn't want to break that spell.

Nate and Parker, though, the most disillusioned behind he himself, don't bother with much concern. Nate doesn't speak up when his secret stash of liquor is infiltrated, and Parker doesn't comment when Eliot expresses interest in rappelling down buildings.

(Something about jumping off impossibly high structures with only a nylon cord holding you back, that near-death experience every time he leaps, seems to appease the voices, so he straps on the harness and goes. Often. One day a specialized rigging system shows up on his bed with a note in chicken scratch reading simply, _This will distribute your weight better than mine does_.)

Eliot tries, once, to train himself to block out the voices like he can block out so many other things, but it fails miserably.

_Don't you fucking dare, boy_, growls the old man whose only crime was to stumble into the path of a sniper bullet aimed at a foreign minister.

_I thought we were friends_, cries the woman to whom he'd gotten close in order to slice her husband's neck open.

_Sir, please don't hurt me_, whispers the teenager who wasn't supposed to be in the house he outfitted with explosives.

_But I helped you_, says the healer who'd fixed up his arm in Myanmar, whom he'd shot in the head because she'd seen his face and _this is how we do things, Spencer_.

He'd told the interrogator during the psych job that he hadn't counted the people he killed, that he didn't need to, but that was more to needle the man than anything else. To clarify: he hasn't _intentionally_ counted. But he's been honed to notice and remember every little detail, and that corner of his mind has a running tally of those whose lives he'd snuffed. He tries not to think about it, tries not to reflect on the horrendously high number, because if he does he's not sure he'll be able to free himself from that downward spiral.

Unfortunately, it's this precise weakness that the voices exploit, and soon he finds himself counting, ticking off which voices have appeared and which ones haven't, and that in and of itself is enough to put him on the brink. He's a master at overcoming pain, at tamping down emotions—this is another beast entirely. This he has no control over, and it's eating him away from the inside out.

(At least people like Moreau had made their intentions and threats clear. You knew what you were up against. In all of Eliot's training, he's never been prepped for _this_.)

When he doesn't show up for a briefing, so ensconced and entrenched in his own mind that he has little sense of what's going on outside of it, Hardison finds him and tries to bring him out of it. He should have known better. Eventually the voices cackle, then hush, and Eliot gains his faculties long enough to see the bloody mess of Hardison's body that he'd caused without realizing it.

The hacker's in ICU for a week before being released, and if he flinches the next time they see each other, Eliot feigns ignorance.

The voices don't, however, and mock him mercilessly for it. Say he deserves the betrayal in Hardison's swollen eyes, deserves the horror that mars Sophie's delicate features, deserves Nate's silent judgment, deserves Parker's coldness. They know he didn't do it out of malice, that it wasn't of his volition but muscle memory, that it was a mistake, yet they blame him. He doesn't begrudge them. He blames himself, too. The voices may have given him the shove, but it had been _his_ hands, _his _knuckles, _his_ violence that put Hardison through four separate surgeries and five different prescriptions.

He shuts himself away after that, refusing to go back to Nate's apartment and run the risk of having his body taken over again. Even the thought of him doing to any of the others what he'd done to Hardison makes his stomach churn. No, better to keep them away from him and safe.

He knows them better than he knows himself, however, knows they'd try to convince him to come back. Hardison would try the hardest, because that's in his nature. Forgiving to a fault. So Eliot clears out his scant belongings and leaves town, his old methods of flying beneath the radar coming back to him like a bad habit. Despite Hardison's boasting that he knows everything about all of them, it's not entirely true. Eliot's got more than a couple secrets, most of which Hardison could find if he wanted but is too squeamish to follow up, and this is one of them.

From a hidden safe in his apartment that takes more than a pickpocket or blowtorch to open, he withdraws documents from an alias he hasn't ever used, hasn't ever _wanted_ to use. Moreau had given it to him, one of many, and he'd kept it as some sort of reminder to never get in bed with evil again. But it's the only way. Armed with a foolproof passport, driver's license, a few dozen bills in six different currencies, and keys to a burner car, he leaves.

_Atta boy_, hisses Chapman.

The voices don't disappear, but at least this time if there's fallout, it'll only be on him.


End file.
